Performance improvement of 10 Gb/s standard fiber transmission systems by using the SPM effect in the dispersion compensating fiber

The use of dispersion compensating fibers (DCF's) has now emerged as the most practical technique to compensate for the chromatic dispersion in the long-haul, optically amplified standard fiber (1.3 /spl mu/m zero dispersion) transmission systems. We investigated the effects of SPM in the standard fiber and the DCF in a repeaterless 10 Gb/s transmission system. We show that the SPM in the DCF reverses the spectral broadening in the standard fiber. We further show that the DCF length which offers the widest eye margin decreases as the launching power into the DCF is increased while the ISI penalty remains the same. This results in an increased signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and hence improvement of the system performance.